stack_framer

> conditionals are `if (...) { ... } else { ... }`

As long as you're not invoking a hook in those if/else blocks!

This is exactly how I feel. I gave hooks a real, exclusive try for two years after they were introduced (2018-2020). I didn't like them—at all—so I went back to only using React as a UI library. I'm lucky enough now to work at a place where nobody else likes hooks either.

I did my own informal research study—I quit social media cold turkey. My findings: I feel much better. I don't need any other data.

Here's a subtle problem: An animation that looks "delightful" on the screens you have, might look pretty bad on a screen you don't have. For example, the author's animation for scaling a button looks fine on my M1 MacBook Pro, but jittery and sluggish on the crappy IBM ThinkVision monitor attached to my MacBook. See for yourself:

MacBook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UjJnxobPlBh_nv18Ych0XHwHEMw...

Crappy Monitor: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jtwJKIFvteLOWD1Pzj1mTZjQwVX...

You're not stupid!

It's a body of water south of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

It used to be called the Gulf of Mexico.

> Sorry, but what does one have to do with the other?

Let me spell it out for you:

Daring Fireball has a really ugly website. On that really ugly website, they are criticizing Apple's ugly icons. This is ironic.

> Are you one of those people who think you can’t criticize a movie unless you’re a director yourself?

No.

How ironic that Daring Fireball, with its eternally drab background color and microscopic font size, is endeavoring to criticize Apple's icons.

No doubt Apple's icons have worsened, but Daring Fireball is throwing rocks from its exceedingly brittle glass house.

I'd be willing to bet that 95% of my "followers" on Twitter are bots. So I get near-zero engagement, or engagement that is worth zero.

I found myself wanting to shuffle with the spacebar (so I wouldn't have to move my pinky fingers from A and L in order to shuffle with a shift key).

> You absolutely need a space to talk candidly with your manager.

It's not so easy when you feel like you can't trust the people to whom you report. I'm in this situation after attempting to be candid about what I felt were missteps on the part of my manager and a director of engineering. After a scolding from one of them, and a veiled threat about my employment ending, I now feel like I just shouldn't rock the boat. I mostly dread my 1:1s with them, and I don't feel like those meetings are time well spent.

I could maybe understand if I had offered unsolicited feedback, but they asked for my opinion and I gave it honestly.

> Am I too cynical?

Not at all. I feel exactly the same way. I'm also introverted, and to me "relationship building" in a corporate context often feels really contrived.

I want to bring as much value as possible to my employer, and I don't feel like I generate value by having 1:1s for the sake of having 1:1s. I jump through the hoop though, because I want a promotion and I'm concerned that I won't get one if I don't fit the norm.

Thanks to Brave[0], I can't remember the last time I had to reject cookies.

[0] https://brave.com/privacy-updates/21-blocking-cookie-notices...

My plugin supports this, but only if I happen to know the shortcut. When I start typing...

  border-radi

...for example, the plugin doesn't suggest...

  rounded

...because I didn't type anything close to matching that.

It seems like the only way to benefit from Tailwind without having to switch between your file and the docs is to invest time memorizing the many, many, many shortcut classes that don't start with the same word or letters as the actual CSS property name you already know.

I hope what you describe will eventually be true for me, but so far the purported benefit of not jumping around isn't being realized. After 5 weeks of using Tailwind every day, I still have to switch between my file and the Tailwind docs fairly often to look up whatever shortcut classes I need.

So far I just miss CSS modules. Having my .tsx and .scss files both visible in split screen wasn't so bad.

I've never contracted, but I'm in the exact same boat with regards to being someone else's full-time employee. Lately I've been struggling to stay even one year—I've been with 4 companies over the past 4 years! I'm a "flight risk". :)

And it's not that I don't want to work. I put 3-4 hours per weeknight into side projects, and another 8-12 hours on weekends. I have yet to make money on the side, but I keep hoping that something will succeed and I can run my own ship.

I recently spent four weeks interviewing before landing a job, which is not an unusual amount of time compared to years prior (at least for me). The company I joined went from first interview to a good offer in two weeks—they were definitely eager. I put my application out approximately 50 times. Changing my LinkedIn status to "Open to work" helped.

The biggest difference this time around: Several companies invoked a hiring freeze while I was in the middle of their interview process. I've never had that happen before, so it felt like a storm brewing. Some were nice enough to tell me right away, while others went completely dark for weeks before getting back to me.

Good luck with the job search! I know it can be utterly miserable, but stay positive and keep those live-coding skills sharp as a razor.

I think we overlook wordiness too often! In fact, each "good" example in TFA can be shortened without losing context:

Good:

"I checked the foobar.py script and told Sarah that there was a bug related to updating the users table in SQL — the script does not seem to update the last name column."

Better:

"I found a bug in foobar.py and told Sarah it's not updating the last name column in the users table."

Good:

"Hi team, the email sending worker keeps crashing with the following exception. I've tried re-running, clearing the cache, re-installing dependencies. Can I get a hand?"

Better:

"The email sending worker keeps crashing with the exception below. I reran it, cleared the cache, and reinstalled dependencies. Can I get a hand?"

Good:

"The resource defines two routes, but the GET handler can only handle one of those — the one without any path params. I can technically make a request GET /api/foobar/123/456 and have the app crash with a 500 because there is a route but the handler doesn't take any params.

Roughly speaking, there are two "types" of resource endpoints — list and singular.

List type resource endpoints handle - getting a list of resources: GET /things - creating a new resource: POST /things

Singular type resource endpoints handle - getting a single resource: GET /things/123 - updating a single resource: PATCH /things/123 - deleting a single resource: DELETE /things/123

To handle all cases properly, you need two resources:

... "

Better:

"The resource defines two routes but the GET handler can't take path params, so a request to GET /api/foobar/123/456 crashes the app with a 500.

There are two "types" of resource endpoints:

List: - get a list of resources: GET /things - create a resource: POST /things

Singular: - get one resource: GET /things/123 - update one resource: PATCH /things/123 - delete one resource: DELETE /things/123

So you need two resources:

... "

I've been happily paying for my own WebStorm license for 7 years—using it at home and at work. In the middle of that, I tried VS Code for a whole year at a new job, to really see how it compared (my new team was using it).

It wasn't better in any way. In fact, most days I just missed WebStorm, but I soldiered on to see if I could find anything that was truly an improvement. At the end of my self-imposed, one-year trial, I concluded that VS Code had just one "advantage": it was free. Its barrier to entry was zero, from a pricing perspective. But since I had really given VS Code a fair shake, I gladly went back to WebStorm at work.

Fast forward to this year, when I ran head on into a serious WebStorm performance problem: type checking a very large TypeScript code base. The WebStorm logs show that the TypeScript language server is crashing, and I filed a bug with JetBrains many months ago, but zero progress. VS Code, on the other hand, has no problem type checking this huge code base—it happens near instantly. For months I have now had WebStorm open for editing, and VS Code open for type checking, which is ridiculous, and I'd be embarrassed if my team knew I was doing this.

It pains me greatly to say it, but perhaps the time has come to cancel my WebStorm license and just switch to VS Code.

I mean, why not, if JetBrains is just set on copying VS Code anyway? I'll take better performance with a worse UI, and it seems like that's precisely what VS Code can give me at this point. How sad.

My kids watch everything with closed captioning on (ages 10 and 7)! I think now I know why, and it's my fault: I used to always tell them to turn the dang volume down. I guess then they couldn't hear the dialogue, so they figured out how to turn on closed captioning.

I used Dgraph as the primary data store in a production app for over a year. I really enjoyed thinking of our model in terms of a graph, and finding creative ways to query what we needed.

The biggest pain point for me was the query language schizophrenia: Incomplete support for GraphQL, or their custom Dgraph Query Language (DQL). As Manish said, they missed the GraphQL train. They really should have gone all in on GraphQL, and only GraphQL.

Take a look at https://www.humanprogress.org

I interviewed at age 42 with an early-stage startup composed of a handful of twentysomethings. They asked me on three separate calls if I was concerned about how young they all were—which in retrospect seems like a veiled form of ageism. They ultimately told me that their company was not yet ready for someone with my "level of experience". I wonder if I should have sued them.

Part of the problem is that ordinary users have no clue just how much the app actually costs to develop and maintain. And how could they?

I worked on Socrative for several years (similar to Quizlet), and we had backlash when we introduced a "Pro" version with paid features. All existing free features, which had been developed over several years, could still be used for free—it was only new features that would be behind the paywall. Many users lamented all over social media that Socrative was no longer "free." But it had never been free—it had been losing over $1m per year!

I'm currently developing an app that I personally want, and I'm having a blast! I got the idea after reading a plethora of negative app store reviews for competitor apps.

I certainly hope others will want to use it and pay for it, but it's liberating not focusing too much on what other people want (or claim they want).

> revenue for the past nine months grew from US$1.5 billion to US$2.04 billion ($2.95 billion) (or around 24%).

Forgive my math skills at 4:07 in the morning, but isn't that actually 36% growth?

> Atlassian’s legacy Jira product ... is no longer loved by developers.

As a developer I prefer Jira over every alternative I've tried (Clubhouse, Trello, GitHub Issues, and Monday.com).

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system).

That seems like a pretty big hassle though. My company is way too busy to undertake switching ticketing systems.

> I'd rather spend a week at the beginning of the project and set things up the way I want them with minimal dependencies.

Me too. I don't use create-react-app or anything else to set up my Node.js/React/TypeScript/SWC projects. I install each package I need manually, and configure each item precisely how I want it (tsconfig.json, webpack.config.ts, .swcrc, even .eslintrc.json). Makes for a nice, lean project every time.

This explanation resonates with me.

I first saw Ryan Dahl's talk about his Node.js regrets[0] during the early days of the pandemic. I thought I'd be eager to try Deno when it became more mature, but I still haven't tried it. I guess I'm not convinced that it's 10x better than Node.js.

[0] https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing

This is why I wouldn't continue interviewing with you, but perhaps not for the reasons you think.

Despite my 15 years of experience as a software developer, your test will likely have some edge-case question that I won't get right. I'm terrible at timed tests, but I'm not a terrible software developer. Why should I spend 4 hours of my weekend failing to prove myself to you? I'd so much rather spend an hour or two having a detailed, technical conversation with you—and I think you would too. You can glean a lot from a conversation (it's easy to copy/paste code from Stack Overflow, but it's not easy to fake it through a lengthy, technical discussion)!

> "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others"

I came here to say precisely this. In addition to Jira, I've used Clubhouse, Trello, monday.com, and GitHub Issues. Jira sucks slightly less than the alternatives I've used.

The worst thing about Apple Music on macOS are the "smart" playlists. They can't be disabled, they keep coming back no matter how many times I delete them, and they're always at the top, so they push my playlists out of sight. Just absolutely terrible UX.